


the heart that yearns is always young (you can’t love just anyone)

by lettersfromnowhere



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Introspection, Love Confessions, Soulmates, You Can Pry the Poet!Zuko Headcanon From My Cold Dead Hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:40:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29610246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettersfromnowhere/pseuds/lettersfromnowhere
Summary: Zuko and Katara discuss soulmates.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 78





	the heart that yearns is always young (you can’t love just anyone)

**Author's Note:**

> It was 2 A.M. when I started writing this and I'd been stupid enough to take a nap at 9 P.M. so half an hour later, y'all get a random oneshot about nothing. I just think that conversations on docks and talking about soulmates and Zuko being an awkward poetic bean are good for the soul. This is very stupid but I am going to post it anyway, because I have no inhibitions at three in the morning. Yippee!
> 
> Also why am I wasting my favorite song lyric of all time on the title of a oneshot I wrote in a rush at 2 AM? Who knows.

“Do you believe in soulmates?” 

They’re sitting at the end of the dock, not touching - not quite. Katara’s left foot kicks absentmindedly at the water beneath, though her right - the one not-quite-touching Zuko’s - is absolutely still. She’s fixed her eyes on the glassy surface of the lagoon and she’s staring into it as if she expects it to reflect the answers to her most pressing questions and not merely her own face - her own, and Zuko’s, though she hardly looks at his. 

(Maybe it’s because that reflection would answer too many of those pressing questions, and what she really wants to see when she gazes down at the water is nothing at all.)

He takes a moment to answer, but when he does, it’s a simple “maybe.” 

  
“Hm.” Katara’s foot, kicking the water in tight, clockwise circles, changes direction. She’s not sure what answer she wanted, or which she expected, but that one’s somehow as disappointing as any of the other possibilities. 

“Why do you ask?” Now Zuko’s foot, too, begins to disturb the water. They’re too hesitant, too gentle to splash each other - they’ve grown far too used to tiptoeing around each other not to slip into that kind of cautious ease without even thinking about it - but they kick up a ripple that travels a few yards past the dock before ebbing out into glassiness again. 

Katara shrugs. “I guess I just like the idea of it.” 

“But you don’t believe in them,” Zuko guesses. He knows her too well now not to know that she would never have asked him that question if she were certain she could answer it the way she wants to. 

“I guess I just wish I could.” 

“Why not?” 

Katara laughs without mirth. “When has life ever been kind enough to give me what I want?” 

“I don’t see what that has to do with an abstract concept that doesn’t relate specifically to you.” Zuko thinks that taking on an affectedly formal cadence will make him less stiff, more personable - he’s wrong, but Katara’s grown to love the awkwardly formal structure of his sentences when he’s trying too hard not to slip up too much to correct him. 

“Maybe I’m just cynical.” She turns her fixed gaze up to the sky, blinking a few times to adjust her vision to the light of the full moon above her. “Or maybe I just know better.” 

  
“You’d probably be happier if you didn’t immediately assume everything was going to go wrong.” Zuko doesn’t realize he’s mirroring Katara when he, too, turns his face to the moon, but he can’t help but follow, orbiting her as he does. 

Katara scoffs, though she doesn’t mean to sound derisive. “Says _you?”_

Zuko can’t really deny that he’s not one to talk about happiness or cynicism, so he doesn’t try. “I am _very_ qualified to give you advice that I don’t follow,” he says instead. “I mean, I know _I_ would be happier if I did that, so I might as well...right?” 

“Then why don’t you?” Katara tilts her head ever-so-slightly to the side, though she doesn’t realize it and Zuko won’t meet her eyes for long enough to see it. “Don’t you want to be happy?” 

“I don’t think I’ll ever believe that I deserve to be.” 

Katara shakes her head, loose curls brushing her bare shoulders over the wraps she’d worn to swim earlier and never changed out of. “When was the last time I told you that you were an idiot?” 

“I think it was about three hours ago.” 

Katara digs her elbow - hard - into Zuko’s side. “That was a rhetorical question.” 

“And that was a rhetorical answer,” Zuko fires back. It’s a terrible defense and he knows it, but Katara manages a laugh that sounds more like a pained wheeze at the ridiculousness of the argument, so he brushes off his embarrassment. He’s so _clumsy_ around her, sometimes, and he hates the way he feels when he is, but Katara never points it out, never makes him feel as if he has cause to be ashamed of the way he trips over words when she’s with him. She’s safe, even though she seems to know a thousand synonyms for “idiot” and she uses them all to describe him regularly, even though she teases him mercilessly. Because even when she does, she is warm beside him. Even when she has no words for his denseness or his utter disregard for his own well-being or the way he can’t see even a sliver of what she does when she looks at him, she rests her head on his shoulder and doesn’t even need words to tell him what she thinks of him. Even when he tests her patience, her eyes soften for him like they never have for anyone, at least not that he’s seen. 

(Oh, how he _hopes_ that he is the only person for whom her eyes soften that way.) 

If he were Uncle, perhaps he’d describe her as the cup of oolong one might come home to at the end of an exhausting day. But he’s not, and he’s not sure what words best describe everything that she is to him, and suddenly the idea that life’s taught her not to believe her future might be better than her past - not to believe that love that is real and bright and _chosen_ might be ahead of her - is more than he can stand. He kicks the surface of the water with so much force that a shower of droplets rains down into their laps and Katara yelps, though it’s utterly ridiculous for a _waterbender_ to be afraid of being splashed and they both know it. 

  
“What was _that_ for?” 

  
“Yes,” Zuko says, trying with everything in him not to let his voice wobble. “I changed my mind. Yes. I think I do believe in soulmates.” 

“And...that upset you?” Katara asks, eyeing the rivulets of seawater running down her forearms and thighs. 

“No, what upsets me is that _you_ don’t.” Zuko brushes a few droplets from his own forearms. “Because I don’t know if I believe in soulmates for _me,_ but _you?_ Someone like you...someone like you _has_ to have...someone.” He shakes his head. “Someone like you should get to believe that you’re going to find someone who’s...who _gets_ you, and doesn’t ask you to hide the parts of yourself that aren’t easy to see, and is going to look out for _you_ for once when you’ve always had to be the one looking out for everyone else.” His hands fist. “And the fact that you think you _can’t_ makes me so _angry_ that I...I don’t even know.” By now, he’s so shot through with adrenaline that he can barely feel the water lapping against his ankles. “Agni, Katara. If _you,_ of all people, don’t have a soulmate, I’m going to riot.” 

“Against what?” Katara giggles, uncertain, tenuous, pleased. His heart lifts. 

“Against whoever or whatever told Katara she couldn’t have the kind of love they write damned poems about,” he spits. 

She’s so taken aback that she can’t form a coherent response for a moment. “I didn’t know you felt that way,” she says softly, once she’s gotten her bearings, and he looks over at her. He can only see her in profile - shoulders hunched, arms folded across her chest, cheeks and jawline sharp in the moonlight’s outline, hair tumbling in tousled curls down her almost-bare back - and he has to blink a few times, like she is the sun and he can’t look at her for too long.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about how I feel.” 

“Yeah.” Katara’s foot, which had stilled, resumes its motion, though now it’s tracing figure-eights instead of circles in the water. “I guess there is.” 

“Maybe I’d like you to know.” His foot, too, resumes moving. “Some of it.” 

“Yeah?” Katara finally looks over at him, though it’s barely a passing glance before she ducks her chin again to hide the blush in her cheeks. “I would like that. I think.” 

His hand inches closer to hers, and it would be all too easy for her to brush it off, think he was just shifting his weight and not reaching for her. But she doesn’t; she meets him in the middle. Hands, it seems, stand in for hearts in this moment - reaching, too shyly to take hold, almost timid enough to ignore save for whatever force of magnetism is insisting they find each other. Hands, it seems, like hearts, are not to be taken; she does not take his hand, but covers it with her own, and for a beat neither remembers to breathe. Their faces turn up to the sky and not to each other; after a fraught moment, Zuko flips his hand so his palm rests flat against hers, and she inches closer to him so that they won’t have to stretch. In the water, her foot collides with his on its course; they both laugh, though neither says a word, or looks at the other. For a beat, they sit in perfect silence; he breaks it. 

(He breaks everything, he sometimes thinks. This he doesn’t mind - not when he knows it won’t leave wreckage behind.) 

“I think,” he says, and his fingers lace through hers in what is somehow the simplest and the bravest thing he’s ever done at the same time, “that if soulmates do exist, I hope that mine is you.”

It’s not a sentence he ever expects to hear a response to, and he doesn’t. But she rests her head against his shoulder.

“I didn’t mean that I didn’t want that, too,” she _finally_ replies, “only that I thought it was too much to ask.”

He wants to press their joined hands to his chest. _Is_ anything _too much to ask of me?_ He wants to ask. _Haven’t I already showed you that?_

But he doesn’t.

“Why do soulmates have to be chosen _for_ you?” he asks instead. “Why can’t they be something you choose yourself?” 

“What if you choose wrong?” Katara shrugs. “Good intentions don’t always mean that love will last.”

“But what if you choose _right?”_ he counters. _What if_ we _choose right?_ “Isn’t it worth it, then? Not...something that was always meant to be, but something that you chose to make inevitable?” 

Katara shakes her head. “Do you always get poetic late at night?”

He pokes her shoulder. “Only with the right subject.”

  
“I’ve never understood that about you,” Katara says, with the kind of sigh that lets him know she’s agreed with every word he’s said, that some weight is gone from her shoulders. “How you can go from stiff and fake-formal to tripping over your own words to waxing poetic in a single conversation.”

“Believe me, if I understood how that happens any better than you do, you would know about it.” 

“By that you mean you’d stop, don’t you.” 

“Obviously.” 

“Don’t,” she laughs. “It’s endearing.” 

He arches his eyebrow. “Didn’t know you felt that way.” 

“Well, I guess there’s a lot you don’t know about how I feel.” She inches close enough to press herself into his side, and he opens his arm to pull her in without a second thought even though he’s never exactly taken the liberty before. “So...anything you’re dying to know?” 

“Plenty,” he says, but he doesn’t press. She understands this, somehow: he isn’t asking, but he isn’t rejecting, either; there’s a _later_ that both recognize without acknowledging that it exists, and that is where the questions and the answers fit in. In that _later,_ perhaps he’ll put words to the way she is the only one who knows how quickly he can lapse from awkward, minute-long silences into impromptu poetry, and the only one who makes him feel so warm without overheating. Perhaps he’ll ask her if she feels it, too, the pull of sun to moon, warm to cool, partner to partner. 

  
But not now. 

Now, they turn their faces, again, to the light of the full moon. 


End file.
